06/08/2026 This review came from Phil McNulty, editor of ‘The Fringe Poetry Magazine’, who purchased Crackmask directly from Eddie at a book sale in July 2026. Hence, no Amazon review screenshot...who purchased Crackmask directly from Eddie at a book sale in July 2026. Hence, no Amazon review screenshot... I received a powerful and deeply thoughtful review of Crackmask today, and I want to share it here. It’s one of those rare pieces of feedback where the reader has really taken the time to understand the book, the life behind it, and the people who shaped it. I’ve thanked the reviewer privately, but I want to say here how much I appreciate the care he took in writing this. It’s honest, clear, and deeply considered. He understood the heart of the book and the message behind it, and I’m proud to share his words. More reader reviews will be added as they come in. A new submission to the crackmask.com Contact Form. Submitted Information: Name Phil McNulty XXXXXXXXXXXX Country of origin UK REVIEW
A remarkable memoir, tightly and professionally presented with one alarming bite-sized chapter following another. The book is not for the faint-hearted. The lows are exceptionally bad, and there are so many of them, but by sheer grit, graft, stubbornness and luck Eddie comes through decades of stupor, squalor and misadventure. The book is grindingly honest and the parade of side characters- addicts, alcoholics, drifters and lost souls- are shockingly familiar to anyone who has worked the fairgrounds and cash-in-hand labouring. The book reads as a true account, but the truths are raw and uncomfortable and much of the story does not elicit sympathy. There are plenty of aphorisms and nuggets of home-spun wisdom which are of real value. Obviously, Eddie makes it through and generates real value for others and for himself, but it is only towards the very end that he experiences a series of Damascene revelations which help to sort out his disordered life. The central message of surviving a damaged childhood, avoiding self-blame, and of hope are so powerful that Crackmask deserves a place on Sociology and Social Work curricula. And we must, must, look after all of our children. New Reader Review...
Eddie writes... This review was sent to me by a Scottish lady, Kirsty, I’ve known in passing over the years. We met occasionally in Bangkok during the last couple of decades, but only briefly and never often. Even so, she took the time to read Crackmask and sent me this thoughtful response, which I appreciate very much. Here is what she wrote: I read the book this weekend over about three days. It was a compelling and gripping read. One just has no idea what goes on, or has gone on really, behind anyone’s mask. Over the years, I had picked up minuscule snippets of bits and bobs in your life, but never would have known the background to the most generous and empathetic man you became, helping all those children over your SE Asian and Thai years. It is a privilege to know you, Eddie, and to have met Yummy (Abbie) in Bangkok. I am grateful for her kind words and for the care she took in writing them. It is always encouraging to hear how the book lands with people who have crossed paths with me in one way or another. More reader reviews will be added as they come in.
Here you’ll find the echoes behind the memoir, small stories, recovered moments, and the thoughts that rise when you look back over a lifetime lived in the cracks and the light.
Back to Where the Lights First Came On |
| A return to the Octagon Theatre, Bolton Some places stay stitched into you long after you’ve walked away from them. Today, standing beside a plaque in the Octagon Theatre in Bolton, I found myself face to face with one of those places, and with the boy I used to be. The plaque marks the opening of the theatre by Princess Margaret on 27 November 1967. I was there that day, not as a guest, not as a dignitary, but as a wide-eyed trainee sound and lighting engineer on my very first job in any theatre. I was seventeen, skint, dyslexic, and absolutely certain of only one thing: I wanted to be part of the magic. And somehow, I was. I wasn’t just behind the scenes either. I found myself on stage in Oh What a Lovely War and a handful of other productions, a part-time actor with more enthusiasm than technique, learning the craft by doing it, failing at it, and doing it again anyway. The Octagon was the first place that let me be both the lad in the wings and the fool under the lights. |  Pointing back to the spot where I first learned how to make magic happen on stage, long before I knew I’d spend decades doing it around the world. |
Today’s visit was meant to be simple, a meeting with my dear friend Khun San, over from Bangkok, and Tony, an old Front of House Manager who’s still as sharp and warm as ever. But walking through those doors again pulled a thread I hadn’t touched in decades.
I remembered the early days: the smell of dust on hot lamps, the clatter of scenery being dragged across the stage, the quiet panic before a cue, the louder panic when you missed one. I remembered the actors, some of them just starting out, and a few of them destined to become household names. And I remembered the characters behind the scenes, the ones who never made it to the programme notes but shaped the place as surely as any director.
The first Front of House Manager, for instance, was the marvellously named Mr John Whacket. A posh London “lovie” with impeccable manners and a voice that could butter toast. He treated everyone, even the scruffy trainees like me, with a kind of gentle dignity that made you want to stand a little straighter.
And then there was the Wardrobe Mistress. I wish I could remember her name. She ran her department with an iron fist and a heart that beat for the theatre. She died suddenly in the sewing room, and within weeks the stories began, footsteps where no one walked, the faint smell of lavender backstage, costumes shifting on their rails. Every theatre has a ghost; the Octagon didn’t waste time acquiring its own.
Standing there today, pointing up at that plaque like a tourist in my own past, I realised just how much that place shaped the road ahead. Without the Octagon, I doubt I’d have become a professional entertainer. Without those early lessons in timing, chaos and camaraderie, in the strange alchemy of making people feel something, I might never have stepped onto stages across the world. From Bolton to New York, Bangkok, Shanghai and a thousand more places, from refugee camps to royal halls, the thread began here.
It’s funny how life works. You think you’re just taking a job. You’re actually stepping into your future.
And now, as I write the final chapters of Crackmask, I find myself circling back to these beginnings more often. The places, the people, ghosts and lovies, they all have their part in the story.
If you’d like to follow the journey as it unfolds, you’re welcome to join me over at crackmask.com or on X at @EddieHaworthWrites. There’s much more to come, and some of it started right here, in this photograph, in this theatre, in this moment of remembering.
I remembered the early days: the smell of dust on hot lamps, the clatter of scenery being dragged across the stage, the quiet panic before a cue, the louder panic when you missed one. I remembered the actors, some of them just starting out, and a few of them destined to become household names. And I remembered the characters behind the scenes, the ones who never made it to the programme notes but shaped the place as surely as any director.
The first Front of House Manager, for instance, was the marvellously named Mr John Whacket. A posh London “lovie” with impeccable manners and a voice that could butter toast. He treated everyone, even the scruffy trainees like me, with a kind of gentle dignity that made you want to stand a little straighter.
And then there was the Wardrobe Mistress. I wish I could remember her name. She ran her department with an iron fist and a heart that beat for the theatre. She died suddenly in the sewing room, and within weeks the stories began, footsteps where no one walked, the faint smell of lavender backstage, costumes shifting on their rails. Every theatre has a ghost; the Octagon didn’t waste time acquiring its own.
Standing there today, pointing up at that plaque like a tourist in my own past, I realised just how much that place shaped the road ahead. Without the Octagon, I doubt I’d have become a professional entertainer. Without those early lessons in timing, chaos and camaraderie, in the strange alchemy of making people feel something, I might never have stepped onto stages across the world. From Bolton to New York, Bangkok, Shanghai and a thousand more places, from refugee camps to royal halls, the thread began here.
It’s funny how life works. You think you’re just taking a job. You’re actually stepping into your future.
And now, as I write the final chapters of Crackmask, I find myself circling back to these beginnings more often. The places, the people, ghosts and lovies, they all have their part in the story.
If you’d like to follow the journey as it unfolds, you’re welcome to join me over at crackmask.com or on X at @EddieHaworthWrites. There’s much more to come, and some of it started right here, in this photograph, in this theatre, in this moment of remembering.
The Gift of Being "Stupid"
A short Essay by Eddie Haworth
Intro
Some labels cling to us long after the people who gave them have disappeared. I’ve carried one of those labels since childhood, and over the years, I’ve learned to turn it into something strangely powerful. This is a small reflection on that journey.
 My Dyslexic Life as a Clown | The Essay Because I was born Dyslexic, I was labelled as stupid by teachers, family, and other children. But I always knew something that those clever people couldn’t see while their unprincipled intelligence festered and grew inside their heads. I knew that being nobody but my stupid self brought me closer to reality and honest clarity. I also knew that stupidity allowed my art to flourish unhindered by hidden questions that the clever ones usually only have dishonest answers to. My stupidity has allowed me to embrace happiness in solitude and to avoid the powerful and the flatterers who surround them. Indeed, I have now stopped talking to negative thinkers and people who only hear their own voices in two-way conversations, especially the clever ones who must always be right. |
And now, in the later chapters of my life, I’ve learned something else. Social media, for all its noise and nonsense, has become a surprisingly useful tool, not for validation or applause, but for quietly weeding out the negative ones, the energy drainers, the clever talkers who never listen.
What’s left, after the pruning, are the real friends. The steady ones. The people who show up with kindness instead of competition. And seeing how many of them remain gives me a kind of hope for the future, a reminder that even in a loud world, there are still good voices worth hearing.
My Faceache Page
What’s left, after the pruning, are the real friends. The steady ones. The people who show up with kindness instead of competition. And seeing how many of them remain gives me a kind of hope for the future, a reminder that even in a loud world, there are still good voices worth hearing.
My Faceache Page
A personal reflection on silence, survival,
and the unmasked life behind my memoir, Crackmask.
| There are moments in life when the world feels too loud to bear, when the noise presses in from every direction, demanding my attention, my outrage, or my allegiance. I’ve lived through enough chaos to recognise that feeling instantly. It’s the same pressure I felt as a boy in the places where my life first cracked, the same suffocating noise that followed me through derelict ships, circus tents, psychiatric wards, and refugee camps. Noise has a way of trying to claim you. Perhaps that’s why silence became my oldest companion. Not long ago, I was talking with my old Siamese Buddhist friend, a man who understands silence the way some people understand scripture. Our conversations drift like slow rivers, circling the same questions humans have asked for centuries. On this particular afternoon, we found ourselves speaking about belief, and I mentioned my fondness for the number 42. Not as a cosmic truth, but as a small reminder that meaning is something we craft ourselves from the rubble of our own experience. |  |
He smiled, then asked how I manage to stay sane while living in the West, where the world seems to buckle under the weight of greed, noise, and the endless theatre of power. It wasn’t a challenge. It was a genuine question, the kind asked by someone who has watched the world exhaust itself in much the same ways I have.
My answer was simple, though it took me decades to learn it: I stay sane by refusing to let the world script my mind for me.
I stepped away from the screens long ago. I haven’t owned a television for years, and the last time I surrendered myself to a blockbuster film was back when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Soldier Blue were still echoing through cinemas. I never learned the rituals of sports, never felt the pull of crowds chanting for someone else’s victory. I realised early on that the noise of the world is not neutral; it filled the cracks before I even knew they were there. And I have had enough cracks in my life to know that I must choose carefully what fills them.
This stepping away is not an escape. It’s a kind of unmasking, the same unmasking that became the spine of Crackmask. Since I stripped away the distractions, the noise, the borrowed opinions, I have been left with something raw and unsettling: myself. My own thoughts, history and the shadows I left behind. And if I sit with them long enough, something unexpected happens. The shadows soften while the noise fades. The fractures stop being places of shame and become places where the light can finally get in.
My answer was simple, though it took me decades to learn it: I stay sane by refusing to let the world script my mind for me.
I stepped away from the screens long ago. I haven’t owned a television for years, and the last time I surrendered myself to a blockbuster film was back when One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Soldier Blue were still echoing through cinemas. I never learned the rituals of sports, never felt the pull of crowds chanting for someone else’s victory. I realised early on that the noise of the world is not neutral; it filled the cracks before I even knew they were there. And I have had enough cracks in my life to know that I must choose carefully what fills them.
This stepping away is not an escape. It’s a kind of unmasking, the same unmasking that became the spine of Crackmask. Since I stripped away the distractions, the noise, the borrowed opinions, I have been left with something raw and unsettling: myself. My own thoughts, history and the shadows I left behind. And if I sit with them long enough, something unexpected happens. The shadows soften while the noise fades. The fractures stop being places of shame and become places where the light can finally get in.
 “Lowry saw the fractures in people. I’ve spent a lifetime learning to live with mine.” | Silence, I’ve learned, is not empty. It is a room where truth can breathe. It is the same silence that carried me through the hardest chapters of my life, the ones I’ve written about and the ones I haven’t yet found the courage to share. It is the silence that taught me how to listen, not to the world, but to the small, stubborn voice inside that refuses to be extinguished. People often imagine sanity as a fortress, something you must defend against the world’s chaos. But I’ve come to see it differently. Sanity is not a battle. It is a choice. A quiet, daily choice. It is the decision to step back from the noise, to breathe air that has not been filtered through a screen or a headline. It is the willingness to let the cracks show, to let the light find its way through them, to trust that the parts of me that once felt broken might actually be the parts that keep me human. My friend nodded when I finished, as if he already knew the answer before he asked. Perhaps he did. Perhaps we all do, somewhere beneath the noise. Sanity, for me, is simply the quiet air I choose to breathe. And maybe that is all any of us can do, choose our air, choose our silence, choose the truths that help us stay whole in a world that keeps trying to pull us apart. |
A gentle invitation... If something in these words resonates, if you recognise the cracks, the silence, or the stubborn light that keeps returning, you’re welcome to stay connected. I share occasional essays, fragments, and reflections as Crackmask moves toward publication, and as the larger story continues to unfold.
You can leave your details on the Contact page if you’d like to follow along. (Or just Email Eddie if you can't be arsed with the contact page)
You can leave your details on the Contact page if you’d like to follow along. (Or just Email Eddie if you can't be arsed with the contact page)
Just Sayin’... It’s Probably Not What You Think?
Riding high on a unicycle and squeezing out a tune on national telly, not bad for someone who’d barely crawled out of the nightmare that almost finished me off in the mid‑90s.
You’ll get the full story when you’ve survived the chapters that begin in 1952… just sayin’.
As for the caption on this photo: I don’t use any of my old stage names in the book, but Willie Eckerslike was my first Equity‑registered identity. I carried it for more than a decade, even though it meant absolutely nothing to anyone outside northern England.
Later, I became “Eckie... the artist formerly known as Willie Eckerslike,” around the same time this photo was taken by a dear friend, who I later lost to a fatal mental illness.
There’s a lot more behind this picture, and you’ll understand it all when you read the book.
Riding high on a unicycle and squeezing out a tune on national telly, not bad for someone who’d barely crawled out of the nightmare that almost finished me off in the mid‑90s.
You’ll get the full story when you’ve survived the chapters that begin in 1952… just sayin’.
As for the caption on this photo: I don’t use any of my old stage names in the book, but Willie Eckerslike was my first Equity‑registered identity. I carried it for more than a decade, even though it meant absolutely nothing to anyone outside northern England.
Later, I became “Eckie... the artist formerly known as Willie Eckerslike,” around the same time this photo was taken by a dear friend, who I later lost to a fatal mental illness.
There’s a lot more behind this picture, and you’ll understand it all when you read the book.
| On Monday, it will be 47 years since 4 May 1979. Yeah, that's 17,168 days, 2,452 weeks, each one lived in the long shadow of a moment that could easily have ended everything. "And none of those days were shaped by any other 'historic' events happening in Britain that particular Friday, despite what the newspapers might say." If I’m still here in three days, I’ll raise a quiet glass to the person who made it possible for me to live every single one of those days, the surgeon whose hands gave me the years I needed to grow, to survive, and eventually to write Crackmask. And should the universe have other plans before Monday... I’ll say this now, while I can: the cover is complete. Those bubbles were never just bubbles. They were the little joys I held onto, the ones I later learned to give away to people who had none. This cover is a quiet reminder that even the smallest moments of light can survive the cracks and sometimes escape them. |  |
Author
Eddie Haworth is a memoirist whose life and work span Britain, the Far East, and much of the world. His writing explores survival, resilience, and the journey toward clarity.
Reflections from the life that eventually became Crackmask.
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